Inside this Article

(excerpt) A study in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that beyond moderation, happiness actually has detrimental effects on income, career success, education and political participation [source: Begley]. Surveying more than 118,000 people in 96 countries, psychologists found that people who reported being “moderately happy,” rather than “very happy,” were better educated, wealthier and more politically engaged [source: Chatzky]. The logic follows that people who are happy as clams are wholly content with their current situation. Consequently, they don’t have as much internal drive to climb the ladder to success. (end excerpt)

my comment: I found this article while visiting “HowStuffWorks.com”. If you click on the Chatzky source link it will take you to an article on CNN Money about research results revealing that people who scored “10” on a scale of 1-10 in happiness made less money than those who scored an “8” or “9”.

So what does that tell us? Obviously, people who don’t make the most money are also the happiest (although unhappy people tend to have the least money as well). Maybe we can learn something from these “10”s that the article does not reveal? Maybe money, education, and political activism can actually reduce happiness after a certain point?

Most notably, the researchers don’t mention that the people who rated themselves as “very happy” obviously don’t give a rip that they don’t make as much money, or have as advanced a degree, or get as politically involved as the next guy.